The Actions and Feelings Questionnaire in Autism and Typically Developed Adults

Open access via Springer Compact Agreement We are grateful to Simon Baron-Cohen and Paula Smith of the Cambridge Autism Centre for the use of the ARC database in distributing the questionnaire, to all participants for completing it, to Eilidh Farquar for special efforts in distributing the link and to Gemma Matthews for advice on using AMOS 23. JHGW is supported by the Northwood Trust.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Action perception is intact in autism spectrum disorder

Date of Acceptance:10/11/2014. Copyright © 2015 the authors 0270-6474/15/351849-09$15.00/0. Copyright of all material published in The Journal of Neuroscience remains with the authors. The authors grant the Society for Neuroscience an exclusive license to publish their work for the first 6 months. After 6 months the work becomes available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

What we know now : education, neuroscience and transdisciplinary autism research

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Perceiving and expressing feelings through actions in relation to individual differences in empathic traits : the Action and Feelings Questionnaire (AFQ)

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The cerebellum plays more than one role in the dysregulation of appetite : Review of structural evidence from typical and eating disorder populations

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the Northwood Charitable Trust for funding my PhD studentship. Grant Number: RG15207Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Editorial : Dynamic Emotional Communication

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Emotional self-awareness in autism: A meta-analysis of group differences and developmental effects

Open Access via the Sage Open Access Agreement Acknowledgements We would like to sincerely thank all the authors who shared their data with us. Research data available upon request from first author (C.F.H.). Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The authors thank the Northwood Trust for their financial support for this research.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Sex differences in the association of photoperiod with hippocampal subfield volumes in older adults : A crosssectional study in the UK Biobank cohort

© 2020 The Authors. Brain and Behavior published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Cross-Cultural Differences and Psychometric Properties of the Japanese Actions and Feelings Questionnaire (J-AFQ)

Aims: We aimed to assess the psychometric properties of a Japanese version of the Actions and Feelings Questionnaire (J-AFQ), an 18-item self-report measure of non-verbal emotional communication, as well as to examine its transcultural properties.Methods: The J-AFQ was administered to 500 Japanese adults (age 20–49, 250 male), alongside the Japanese Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ-J) and Empathy Quotient (EQ-J). These were compared to a group of 597 British and Irish participants (age 16–18, 148 male). J-AFQ was assessed in terms of validity by confirmatory factor analysis and convergence with BAPQ-J and EQ-J using Pearson correlation. Internal consistency and differential item functioning (DIF) were assessed and compared between Japanese and UK/Irish participants.Results: Reversed worded items (RWIs) showed poor item-total correlations but excluding these left a 13-item version of the J-AFQ with good internal consistency and content validity. Consistent with the English version, J-AFQ scores correlated with EQ and lower BAPQ scores. However, comparing across cultures, J-AFQ scores were significantly lower in the Japanese sample, and there was evidence of important DIF by country in over half of the J-AFQ itemsConclusion: Cultural differences in attitudes to self-report, as well as increased acquiescence to RWI's also seen in previous studies, limit the value of the 18-item instrument in Japanese culture. However, the 13-item J-AFQ is a valid and reliable measure of motor empathy, which, alongside the English version, offers promise for research in motor cognition and non-verbal emotional communication across cultures

Renormalization Group Running of Newton's G: The Static Isotropic Case

Corrections are computed to the classical static isotropic solution of general relativity, arising from non-perturbative quantum gravity effects. A slow rise of the effective gravitational coupling with distance is shown to involve a genuinely non-perturbative scale, closely connected with the gravitational vacuum condensate, and thereby, it is argued, related to the observed effective cosmological constant. Several analogies between the proposed vacuum condensate picture of quantum gravitation, and non-perturbative aspects of vacuum condensation in strongly coupled non-abelian gauge theories are developed. In contrast to phenomenological approaches, the underlying functional integral formulation of the theory severely constrains possible scenarios for the renormalization group evolution of couplings. The expected running of Newton's constant $G$ is compared to known vacuum polarization induced effects in QED and QCD. The general analysis is then extended to a set of covariant non-local effective field equations, intended to incorporate the full scale dependence of $G$, and examined in the case of the static isotropic metric. The existence of vacuum solutions to the effective field equations in general severely restricts the possible values of the scaling exponent $\nu$.Comment: 61 pages, 3 figure